"As it started I was just playing around," he said, "I wanted to juxtapose some European imagery with African masks."

But by the end, Scott's playing around had taken on a cutting edge.

Scott hoped that basing his computer drawings and collages on some of civilization's most universal images could bridge a gap between the art world and people who don't much care about the art world.

"I feel like I'm a liaison, to some degree," he said, "taking art to a different generation or a different demographic. I think there are a lot of people who would appreciate art if it was presented to them in a way that didn't come off as pretentious and what not."

In the center of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo depicted God at the moment he animated Adam. In the universally known illustration, their fingers almost touch. Scott began his re-imagining of the scene by placing a carved wooden mask from an African culture over Adam's face. Placing a boom box on Adam's shoulder transformed him into a symbol of 1980-style hip hop, Scott said.

Replacing God's head with television broadcasting the reality series "Love and Hip Hop, Atlanta," symbolized the way, in Scott's view, original, socially significant rap culture has devolved into pop superficiality. The figures behind God look like characters from a painting by the sardonic African-American social critic Robert Colescott. The hot rod flames in the center lend a tongue-in-cheek low-art vibe to the proceedings.

Those colorful bullet stripes slice unexpectedly through all of Scott's post-modern pastiches as if, in New Orleans anyway, the unifying factor is danger. To Crescent City art lovers they may symbolize something in addition to violence. The same sort of colorful rays appeared regularly in Ayo's father John T. Scott's paintings and sculpture.

The elder Scott, who died in 2007, was a longtime Xavier University professor, winner of a MacArthur Genius Award and one of New Orleans' most renowned modernists. It's difficult to look at Ayo's art without searching for dad's influence.

Ayo, who works as a graphic designer as well as a fine artist, views his dad as a great role model.

"He was just an amazing artist," Ayo said. "I'm sure I'm biased in saying so, but he was the greatest artist I met, an incredible teacher, just a very giving person. He was always trying to get people to question what they knew of something and offer new information that was one of the things he was into."

Ayo resists using his father's lush colors because, he said, they'll just take over his art. It's not surprising. As a child, he said, even the hand-made toys his father made for him were coated with layers of bright paint.

John Scott's work was sometimes topical, but his work was most often abstract. Ayo's art – at least the work on display at Octavia gallery through Sept. 6 – is much more explicitly political. Those color stripes are the clearest link between the two artists.

In Ayo Scott's retelling of "American Gothic," the scene takes place in the post-Katrina ruin of the flooded Lower Ninth Ward. Scott's version of "Mona Lisa" is smoking cigarettes and waiting for a cell phone call down by the river. In his satire of "The Thinker," he poses the seated nude atop a commode, contemplating social and racial inequities. A world map spreads out at the statue's feet. America seems to have disappeared down the drain. A colorful random bullet ricochets off of a hovering heart.